“Who ever said we were owed happiness?” Magnus said softly, and in his mind he saw the house of his childhood, and his mother flinching away from him with frightened eyes, and her husband, who was not his father, burning. “What about what we owe to others?”
“I’ve given them everything I have already,” said Wil , seizing his coat off the back of the chair. “They’ve had enough out of me, and if this is what you have to say to me, then so have you—warlock.”
He spat the last word like a curse. Regretting his harshness, Magnus began to rise to his feet, but Wil pushed past him toward the door. It slammed behind him. Moments later Magnus saw him pass by the front window, struggling into his coat as he walked, his head bent down against the wind.
Tessa sat before her vanity table, wrapped in her dressing gown and rol ing the smal button back and forth in her palm. She had asked to be left alone to do what Charlotte had requested of her. It was not the first time she had transformed into a man; the Dark Sisters had forced her to do it, more than once, and while it was a peculiar feeling, it was not what fueled her reluctance. It was the darkness she had seen in Starkweather’s eyes, the slight sheen of madness to his tone when he spoke of the spoils he had taken. It was not a mind she wanted to acquaint herself with further.
She did not have to do it, she thought. She could walk out there and tel them she had tried and it had not worked. But she knew even as the thought flickered through her mind, she could not do that. Somehow she had come to think of herself as bound with loyalty to the Institute’s Shadowhunters. They had protected her, shown her kindness, taught her much of the truth of what she was, and they had the same goal she did— find Mortmain and destroy him. She thought of Jem’s kind eyes on her, steady and silver and ful of faith. With a deep breath she closed her fingers around the button.
The darkness came and enveloped her, wrapping her in its cool silence. The faint sound of the fire crackling in the grate, the wind against the panes of the window, vanished. Blackness and silence. She felt her body Change: Her hands felt large and swol en, shot through with the pains of arthritis. Her back ached, her head felt heavy, her feet were throbbing and painful, and there was a bitter taste in her mouth. Rotting teeth, she thought, and felt il , so il that she had to force her mind back to the darkness surrounding her, looking for the light, the connection.
It came, but not as the light usual y did, as steady as a beacon. It came in shattered fragments, as if she were watching a mirror break into pieces. Each piece held an image that whipped by her, some at terrifying speed. She saw the image of a horse rearing back, a dark hil covered in snow, the black basalt Council room of the Clave, a cracked headstone. She struggled to seize and catch at a single image. Here was one, a memory: Starkweather dancing at a bal with a laughing woman in an empire-waisted bal gown. Tessa discarded it, reaching for another: The house was smal , nestled in the shadows between one hil and another. Starkweather watched from the darkness of a copse of trees as the front door opened and out came a man. Even in memory Tessa felt Starkweather’s heart begin to beat more quickly. The man was tal , broad-shouldered—and as green-skinned as a lizard. His hair was black. The child he held by the hand, by contrast, seemed as normal as a child could be—smal , chubby-fisted, pink-skinned.
Tessa knew the man’s name, because Starkweather knew it.
John Shade.
Shade hoisted the child up onto his shoulders as through the door of the house spil ed a number of odd-looking metal creatures, like a child’s jointed dol s, but human-size, and with skin made of shining metal. The creatures were featureless. Though, oddly, they wore clothes—the rough workman’s coveral s of a Yorkshire farmer on some, and on others plain muslin dresses. The automatons joined hands and began to sway as if they were at a country dance. The child laughed and clapped his hands.
“Look wel on this, my son,” said the green-skinned man, “for one day I shal rule a clockwork kingdom of such beings, and you shal be its prince.”
“John!” came a voice from inside the house; a woman leaned through the window. She had long hair the color of a cloudless sky. “John, come in.
Someone wil see! And you’l frighten the boy!”